Enlightenment Invention of the Modern Self

British Empiricism and the Self, II (1x7)

Air date: Feb 12, 2000

The Scottish philosopher David Hume exposed some crucial questions that Locke had evaded. Hume's radical skepticism dissolved any possibility of knowing what the self is. The lecture concludes with the poet Alexander Pope, who struggled to make sense of inner conflict in the limiting confines of the empiricist framework.